With millions of spare set of keys in circulation and homeowners unable to account for them, there is a growing fear that many households are clearly exposed to risk.

This revelation was made in a recent research from Sainsbury’s Home Insurance.

Many homeowners, it found, hardly retrieve spare set of keys from ex-partners, cleaners, builders or previous tenants amongst others.

And this is a worrying development for insurers as this could mean unauthorised person could have access to these homes, affecting their home and content insurance.

This is more so as the study revealed that at least half a million people admitted to not knowing the exact number of spare keys belonging to their property.

Against this backdrop it said there could be more than 100 million sets of spare keys in circulation for UK homes and that each home has four spare keys, on average.

“Almost 700,000 homeowners admit that they have not collected spare set of keys from ex-neighbours or tradesmen or others,” Sainsbury’s Home Insurance manager, Neil Laird commented.